TOM Clarke is angry with the media. Last week, The Guardian followed the Labour MP as he canvassed Coatbridge and its environs, the North Lanarkshire patch he has represented since 1982. The resulting video – entitled “the strange death of Labour Scotland” – painted a less than flattering portrait of a politician and a campaign out of touch with its electorate.

In the short film, St Patrick’s Day drinkers promise Scotland’s longest-serving MP their vote but prevaricate after he moves on. At one remarkable point, the 74-year-old MP accuses journalist John Harris of trying to get a middle-aged man in Moodiesburn “to say things that are anti-Labour”. The Guardian man reacts with shock: “I’ve never had that experience before,” he tells the camera. “Looks to me like under that confidence is a little bit of insecurity. Doesn’t want people talking abut the SNP on his patch.”

Clarke says he is “disappointed with The Guardian” when we speak on the phone just a few days before what is probably the first serious electoral threat he has faced in 33 years at Westminster. The swithering St Patrick’s voters, who looked pretty genuine to me, “were only kidding” Harris and his camera crew. “We thought he knew that.”

Clarke, however, does little to dispel Harris’s sense that there is anxiety beneath the confident assertions about the campaign “going extremely well”. Polls that suggest that it could be a very tight race between Labour and the SNP in North Lanarkshire are “inaccurate”, Clarke says, hinting at a nefarious stitch-up between “the pollsters” and “the media”.

“We have not examined who owns the pollsters? What regulation is there? What link is there between them and the media?” Clarke rails. Such “blame the media” conspiracy theories are familiar to anyone who floated around the margins of the Yes campaign in last year’s referendum.” Clarke even suggests dark forces at play. “If you spoke to Rupert Murdoch you might get an explanation.”

But the SNP posters in back windows of cars on the edge of town are testament to a different reality, one that is at once both far more prosaic and far more incendiary. The residents of Coatbridge’s pebbledash-studded terraced houses and vertiginous multi-storey flats have voted Labour en masse for decades. In 2005, Clarke’s Coatbridge, Chryston and Bellshill seat was the safest in all of Britain. Last time out, the one-time shadow Scottish secretary polled 67 per cent of the vote. Those days are over. The SNP are now a serious challenge to Labour’s dominance.

North Lanarkshire was one of just four councils in Scotland that voted Yes. In the electoral area encompassing Coatbridge, the result was decisively in favour of independence. The day after the referendum, retired schoolteacher Eddie Hagerty organised a party in his house. Along with friends made during the long campaign he decided to form a community group “to improve the quality of life in the town”.

“We decided we had won in Coatbridge so we were going to keep that going in Coatbridge,” Hagerty says when we meet on the pedestrianised main street. He wears a bright yellow high-vis jacket with “Stronger for Scotland” printed on the reverse. Hagerty used to vote Labour – “once” – but is now firmly behind the SNP. The local party has gone from 120 to 1300 since the referendum.

“The Labour party is like a dried seed that has no life in it. Look around this town centre, look at what has happened under a Labour administration; there is no chance for people to be motivated, innovative.”

True, Coatbridge has seen better days. The Iron Burgh’s mighty works, and the jobs they provided, are long gone. The scars of the bleak Thatcher years are all too visible. Main Street is pockmarked with “To Let” signs. Business seems brisk in the bookies and the pubs, but the few bank holiday shoppers are outnumbered by SNP activists, toting stickers, leaflets and even lollipops. All sing from the same hymn sheet: Only the SNP can save the working-class soul abandoned by Labour.

EVEN SNP candidate Phil Boswell harks back to a Labour past. The 51-year-old quotes Jimmy Reid and says: “When I went out to vote first my mum said vote Labour, your grandfather would turn in his grave if you didn’t.”

Boswell has the look of a used car salesman but that seems to be just about the only job he has not done. He has worked everywhere from Hong Kong and Egypt to the Falklands. (“I’m under the Official Secrets Act,” he says with a smile.) For more than a decade his business has been oil and gas. After organising the Yes campaign in Aberdeenshire West, Boswell decided to take a run at the Westminster seat in his hometown.

Boswell’s message, somewhat ironically, is redolent of a famous Tory election slogan: Labour isn’t working. “Walk through Coatbridge, use your eyes, you don’t need politicians to tell you there is something wrong here,” he says. “People are waking up to the alternative, that alternative is the SNP.”

On September 19, Alexandra McArthur woke up and did something she had never done before. She joined a political party. “I’d never been as politically involved as now,” McArthur says, twirling a miniature yellow SNP windmill in her hand while her son, Daniel, plays outside the busy store on the main street. I ask where the Labour equivalent is. McArthur laughs. There doesn’t seem to be one.

Incumbency, however, could be a major factor tomorrow. Clarke is well known across the constituency, held in high esteem by many for his role in negotiating pay settlements for workers in Ravenscraig and some of the other plants that shut in the 1980s and 90s. Clarke’s personal vote could yet win the day in what is likely to be a close contest.

“I always vote Labour,” says Silvia, who asks me not to use her surname. “I’m still going to vote for Labour.” She likes the SNP’s anti-austerity message – “it’s a pity we are not hearing that from Labour” – but says: “I just don’t trust the nationalists.”

Coatbridge is sometimes called “Little Ireland”. In the middle of the 19th century, thousands of Irish emigrants arrived in Glasgow, their search for work often ending in North Lanarkshire. At the time, the Glasgow Free Press called Coatbridge and Airdrie “the nearest thing possible to two Irish colonies”. A century-and-a-half on, around 70 per cent of Coatbridge residents claim Irish descent. The town boasts a Gaelic football team, Irish dancing schools, 10 Catholic churches and republican flute bands that march every summer in Belfast.

The Irish community and the Labour party were once synonymous, but that bond is weakening. Last year, I attended a referendum debate as part of the Coatbridge St Patrick’s Day festival. Tom Clarke told the packed hall beside the local church that leaving the UK would make Scotland poorer and more vulnerable. Some cheered, others booed. Beside him a red-faced man started shouting about Tony Blair and Labour’s role in the 2003 invasion of Iraq. That constitutional ambivalence, if anything, is even more pronounced a year later.

IN the St Columba Club, horse-racing plays on the television. Tables are filled with betting slips, bookies’ pens, and pints of lager. Most of the predominantly older drinkers are backing Tom Clarke, but old certainties about Labour and Coatbridge don’t seem as steadfast any more.

“This town was based on Labour. Iron, coal, steel,” says Sammy McCabe. “I would never have envisaged in my lifetime that Coatbridge would have changed tactics from Labour to SNP.” But most of the former British Steel worker’s family will be voting for Boswell. “They’re going to swing it, the younger element is going to swing it.”

Willie Cosgrove disagrees: “The Labour party are the only one who got the National Health Service, the minimum wage, the welfare system. How can you vote against that?”

Quite what people in Coatbridge, and across Scotland, are voting for – or against – is not exactly clear. Is it about “standing up for Scotland”? Or is it for social justice and a new sense of purpose for long-neglected post-industrial landscapes? Is it about independence? Or punishing the “Red Tories” for joining the toxic Tories during the referendum campaign?

One of the most salient features of the polls is that Labour is weakest in seats with the largest majorities, hinting at decades of ossification hiding below the barrel-load of votes that were, as the cliché goes, weighed not counted for so long.

Outside the Columba Club, a group of men stand puffing on e-cigarettes and squinting in the afternoon sun. They are all keen to talk, giddily shouting over each other.

Tom Clarke’s campaign slogan – “there is hardly a family in is this constituency that I haven’t helped” – does not go down well.

“He’s not helped my family,” says a man with a pronounced scar on his face. “Or mine.” “He’s helped his own.”

One man in particular is anxious to get his point across. A few weeks earlier, he says, Labour came campaigning in his neighbourhood. “All of a sudden this guy from out of the ashes appeared. Tom Clarke. I hadn’t seen him in 20 years.” The rest of the group all laugh.

THIS is supposed to be the social media election. But nobody seems to have told the good people of leafy Morningside. On a blustery weekday afternoon in the land of Miss Jean Brodie few voters seem particularly au fait with the latest Twitter stramash. “I’ve not heard anything about that,” nurse Zoe Gornal, 27, says shaking her head when I ask what she thinks of tweets sent by Edinburgh South SNP candidate Neil Hay about “non Scots accents” on TV and elderly voters who can exercise their franchise “but barely know their name”.

Linda, 60, looks bemused when I mention the word “Quisling”, which appeared in the headline of a spoof news piece that Hay also tweeted from a pseudonymous account in 2012. A rather tortured couple of minutes follow. “It basically means a traitor,” I say. Blank look. “It’s from Norway originally.” Another blank look. “I’m SNP,” Linda says firmly. “I want independence and they are the only ones who will get it.”

Not everyone is quite as blasé about Hay’s online activities. My formal requests for an interview are turned down. Undeterred, I try tweeting Hay, but he seems to have gone quiet on social media of late.

Funny that.

Nicola Sturgeon has, however, been less reticent on the question of her candidate’s Twitter alter ego. “I do condemn the language used and I condemn the comments made – as I always do when anybody steps out of line on Twitter, on Facebook or any medium,” the First Minister said last week.

“Neil Hay has rightly apologised. I think, given that we face an election two weeks today, it’s now up to the voters to decide.”

The storm in a Tweetdeck threatens to overshadow the fascinating contest that is brewing in Edinburgh South. This is one of the most marginal seats in Scotland. In 2010, Labour’s Ian Murray won by just 316 votes, from the Liberal Democrats. The SNP finished a distant fourth.

No prizes for guessing the current state of play. An Ashcroft poll two weeks ago put Labour six points behind the SNP. The Conservatives – who held the seat for almost 70 years before Michael Ancram was unceremoniously deposed in 1987 – were on 15 per cent, with the LibDems’ paper candidate limping home on just 6 per cent.

The good Lord’s polling has been a central feature of this election campaign, pointing to unprecedented shifts in support to the SNP in the most unlikely of places. But buried among the banks of figures, the Ashcroft polls also carry write-ups of focus groups with voters in various Scottish constituencies. These, if anything, are more fascinating than the headline-grabbing numbers. Many participants tell Ashcroft’s pollsters that they like their Labour MP. (“A very, very good local MP”, is the kind of phrase that recurs.) But they are still going to vote SNP.

That seems to be the central problem facing Murray. Before we meet in a chi-chi hotel bar overlooking Bruntsfield links, I phone a couple of friends who live in the constituency I once called home. “He’s a really good local MP” (that phrase again) says one. “So you’ll be voting for him?” “Oh, no. I’m voting for Neil Hay.”

When I lived here, my old amigo was a card-carrying Labour Party member. He voted No in September.

Murray is the kind of local MP many of us would be happy to have. He comes across as diligent, approachable, and hard-working. Raised in the Wester Hailes scheme, his mother was a cleaner, his father died when he was just nine: “We were just a very working-class family. That’s where my politics come from.” Murray’s life since has been more rarified – a degree in social policy and law from Edinburgh University, a successful management company, a council seat followed not long after by the nod for Westminster – but he has always maintained close links to the area. He was at the forefront of the campaign that transformed Hearts from a football club on the brink of extinction to a model of how a community businesses can thrive.

That Murray faces a battle to hang on to his seat is yet more evidence of the sea change in Scottish politics. In September, Edinburgh South voted by an overwhelming margin to stay part of the union. Now, in an effort to sway swithering voters, Murray is trumpeting his anti-Trident credentials. “I would not support the renewal of Trident. I would not vote to support it,” he tells.

Murray admits that many voters tell him they want a Labour government but are voting SNP. This is Labour’s quandary. The Nationalist pitch is, essentially: “Vote for us to get a Labour government.” Labour’s failure to counteract that – surely the best way to get a Labour government is, well, to vote Labour? – attests to the depth of anti-Labour feeling in large parts of this country. Certainly you would be forgiven for thinking it was Labour that had been in power in London for five years and in Edinburgh for eight.

“We need to transform our narrative,” Murray says quite candidly.

Labour has failed to make the SNP’s record in government a major election issue. “The SNP are able to take credit for everything that goes well, but blame somebody else for everything that goes wrong.”

And what of those tweets from his SNP opponent? “Some of the things he has said suggest he might not represent everyone here regardless of how they vote”, says Murray, who stops short of calling for him to stand down.

Hay, for his part, has apologised for the missives, which were sent from an account named Paco McSheepie in 2012. “The words in these old tweets were poorly chosen, and I apologise for any offence caused. They are not in keeping with the way I would express myself now,” the SNP candidate told the Edinburgh Evening News recently.

But are would-be constituents really concerned about Hay’s Twitterstorm? Beyond the social media echo chamber is anybody really listening? Murray says he has received emails and comments on doorsteps, but Scottish Socialist candidate Colin Fox believes voters in Edinburgh South are not going to be swayed by 140 errant characters. “It’s only going to influence those people who weren’t going to vote SNP in the first place,” the former MSP says.

Edinburgh South is often caricatured as the epitome of stolid middle-class affluence, home to JK Rowling and Edinburgh University, but some of the country’s most deprived areas lie within its boundaries, too. “It is a microcosm of Scotland,” says Fox. “65 per cent of the constituency lives in big working-class schemes. Labour’s support there is haemorrhaging.”

Not far from one of those schemes, Inch Park, a Yes café has sprung up in a former Indian takeaway by the side of a busy road. Cars whizz by outside, almost shaking the “Hope Over Fear” Saltire flag off the wall. It feels a bit like a cross between a truckers’ stop and a community centre for the mainly older people who sit drinking cups of tea. A table sells Scotland car flags and copies of books by Stephen Maxwell and Gerry Hassan.

“I’ve got a 10-year lease,” says Mike Blackshaw, the moving spirit behind the café. A larger than life character with a sharp sense of humour, honed over decades on the cricket pitch, Blackshaw is originally from Grantham, home of one Margaret Thatcher (“I did shop in her father’s shop. Her mother was a gem. He father was awful.”). At 18, not long after moving to Scotland, he joined the SNP. That was 48 years ago.

On the café whiteboard is an exhortation based on the latest polling: “Only 3 per cent ahead. Maximum effort required.” Blackshaw is confident that Hay will emerge victorious despite his recent travails. “We’ve canvassed a lot of people since Neil’s things in the papers. We have only had two or three comments and two of those took posters,” he says.

At a nearby table, Pat, 66, is enjoying a slice of homemade chocolate cake.

She “got so politically motivated during the referendum that I didn’t know what to do with myself.” She comes to the café twice a week, a 25-minute journey in her mobility scooter.

Across the room, Gordon Wright, 73, complains that the local papers have been “hammering Neil”. “But it might have the very opposite effect. It might make people feel sympathy for him.”

An SNP man for 55 years, Wright is the man who took the famous photo of the 11 newly-elected Nationalist MPs standing outside the Caledonian Hotel in Edinburgh in 1974. That remains the SNP’s best Westminster showing – well, at least for the next week.

Back on Morningside Road, the fabled ladies who lunch are “fed up” with all the talk of politics. “I’ve had enough of it,” says one woman as she browses the rails of scarves in Meander. Her friend agrees.

Both are “not Labour” but they are worried about the prospect of another independence referendum.

Owner Julie Brechin is more sanguine: “We’re feeling more enthused. There was a real bounce from the referendum and that has carried through to the general election. People are more knowledgeable and more comfortable talking about politics.” What about Ian Murray? “He’s a good guy”.

I feel like I barely need to ask what way she will be voting, but I do anyway. SNP. I ask about Neil Hay’s tweets. Another blank face.

Paisley has more than its fair share of attractions. There’s the medieval Abbey, cradle of the Royal House of Stewart. The art deco Russell Institute and the recently renovated Victorian town hall. But it’s not architectural history – nor this weekend’s Paisley Beer Festival – that has drawn the world’s media to Renfrewshire. CNN, The New York Times and countless others have come in recent weeks to witness a contest that could define this General Election: the– 20-year-old novice going toe-to-toe with the shadow Foreign Secretary.

Mhairi Black admits that the press attention has been “a bit bizarre”. But the SNP candidate for Paisley and Renfrewshire South appears largely unfazed. Wearing a button-up blue shirt with her blonde hair tied back, she looks like a quietly confident final year Glasgow University student on her way to her first proper job interview. And in a way she is.

Black, an SNP member since 2011, has only been involved in one previous political campaign, last year’s referendum.

She is up against Douglas Alexander, a Labour heavyweight with a national profile and a majority well north of 16,000. The latest Lord Ashcroft poll put Black 11 points ahead. Scotland stands on the cusp of its “Portillo moment”.

“I think this constituency is quite representative of what is happening across Scotland right now,” says Black when we meet in a busy coffee shop on Gauze Street, the name an echo of Paisley’s prosperous industrial past. “What we witnessed during the referendum was a political awakening across the country. It was always going to be the case that the General Election was going to be different.”

Across the table sits her father and election agent, Alan. The 54-year-old used to vote Labour before joining the SNP.

His daughter is appealing directly to voters to follow suit. “Now people are focusing on what Labour are offering or what Labour are not offering and they are saying ‘that doesn’t represent me’,” says Mhairi.

She describes Douglas Alexander, pictured right,

as “quite disappointing” and “a careerist”. “I’m sure he’s been good to some people but he has not represented this area half as well as he should have.”While Japanese reporters and Brazilian television crews have been a pleasant novelty on the campaign trail, Black has faced some harsh headlines closer to home. Old tweets and videos have been dredged up.

There have even been accusations of anti-Catholicism – even though she was baptized in the faith.

But Black is not the wild youth she has at times been depicted.

Behind the callow exterior lurks a definite steeliness. When she says she “wants to help people” only a churl could doubt her. Her belief in independence is steadfast but, like Nicola Sturgeon, insists that this election isn’t about the break-up of Britain. Top of her concerns is poverty. “The fact that in this day and age you have people relying on food banks is disgraceful,” Black says. Close your eyes and you can almost picture her mentor Jim Sillars.

That message resonates in Paisley, a town of contrasts. With 75,000 people, a university, a cathedral and an abbey, by rights it should be a city.

Singer Paolo Nutini lives in one of the numerous avenues lined with trees and palatial Victorian residences. Less than half a mile way is the local food bank. There is a soup kitchen, too.

On a warm spring day, an accordion duo plays outside Bargain Buys on Paisley’s pedestrianised high street. The high street is littered with To Let signs. Eddie Nardini’s ice-cream stall is doing a roaring trade but he complains that his nearby shop is struggling. “Scotland is not getting its fair share from the UK,” says Nardini. There is a yellow SNP sticker on the side of the cart. What will happen in the General Election? “The SNP will get the most seats.” He looks confident.

The crowd on the high street is evenly spread between shoppers and over-enthusiastic salespeople, mainly from mobile phone companies and charities. Sean Duffy is distributing leaflets, too, but for a rather different product. “We believe that capitalism is the problem,” Duffy, a warehouse worker, says handing me a Communist Party flyer with a cartoon of an over-sized cat smoking a cigar. “We believe that capitalism has to be taken away from the people.”

The Communists are not running a candidate in Paisley and Renfrewshire South but Duffy and his comrades come out once a week to sell the Morning Star and spread the word. Since the referendum people “people are talking to you more”, says Duffy. He comes from a family of Labour supporters, but when I ask if they will be sticking with the party he makes a face that says “maybe”.

Douglas Alexander was not available to speak with me, but I did call into the local Labour campaign headquarters, a large store-front on Causewayside Street festooned in red. Inside, more than half a dozen volunteers and party officials are busy drawing up campaign rotas and stuffing envelopes with personalised letters from Alexander, who has represented the area since 1997. “We are confident but not complacent,” says one staffer who asks not to be named.

Maureen Pollock, chairwoman of Labour’s Paisley branch, admits that there has been “a national trend” away from the party. In 46 years as an activist this election is “different to anything I’ve seen before”. But, she insists, “Douglas can win”.

Despite the lugubrious polling numbers, Labour has reason to be optimistic.

The party won the local elections here in 2012. Alexander has a particularly high profile – the former Scotland Secretary is overseeing Labour’s UK election campaign. Such a national presence is an “advantage” for the local area, says Hugh Henry, Renfrewshire South MSP. “People recognize that he is an asset.”

Alexander’s public stature counts for little, however, in the legal high shop next door to Labour’s campaign office.

“Labour had their chance and they never done nothing,” says Billy, who is looking after the shop for a friend. “No point putting your money on the same horse if they don’t do anything.” He wears a Rastafarian hat and sits surrounded by huge clear plastic bongs, boxes of over-sized cigarette papers and Jamaican flags.

He will be voting SNP. “Independence is going to happen,” he says as a disheveled middle-aged man hands over a £10 note for “a gram” of an undecipherable substance in a shiny wrapper. As I leave, three more customers arrive.

Paisley’s social problems have been acerbated by the recession, says Sandra Webster, the Scottish Socialist Party candidate. A carer with two children with autism who lives in a council house, Webster has

“experienced austerity first hand”.

Her one night a week respite has been cut.

Webster has no grand designs on a Westminster career. Indeed, the Scottish Socialists only stood in the seat because the party – like everyone else – assumed Alexander’s majority was unassailable. “We thought the SNP don’t have a chance, so we wouldn’t be splitting the Yes vote,” she says. But the SSP is keen to build on its own membership surge since the referendum. “We are the original anti-austerity party, not the SNP,” she says.

In 2010, Paisley and Renfrewshire South was stony soil for both the Liberal Democrats and the Tories, and there is little sign of the Coalition parties seeing a revival in their fortunes this time around.

Eileen McCarten, a LibDem councillor with 27 years’ experience, is well liked and quick witted but admits that she has “not been packing my bags to go to London”. Her task, instead, is “to highlight the huge amount of good work we have done in the last five years.”

At 26, the Conservative’s Fraser Galloway is positively geriatric compared to Mhairi Black. An Edinburgh lawyer in a field dominated by candidates with strong local connections, Galloway’s pitch is firmly to Unionists. “We are the only party that is standing up for the Union,” he says. “We are proud of the role we played in Better Together. If you want a strong Unionist voice vote for me.”

But the indications are that few “Buddies” are looking for a strong pro-UK voice. Rona Rice was one of the majority of Renfrew folk who voted No last year. She has no intention of voting SNP next month but is swithering about whether to back Labour. “I’ve always been Labour but I’m not that happy. They don’t seem to be the same as they were. They don’t seem to be that working class any more,” Rice says sitting in the sun outside the town hall.

On a nearby bench, Patrick sits with his partner Isabella. He “will definitely be voting Labour”, but she is switching to the SNP. “I voted Labour all my days and what have they done? They’ve had their chance. Although my grandfather would be turning in his grave at me.”

Before I leave, taxi driver Hugh Hunter takes me on a scenic tour of Paisley. “It is overshadowed by the big city seven miles away [Glasgow]. But there is a lot of renewal. Paisley is coming back,” he says as we pass the last remaining mill, now turned into a business park. In the distance the magnificent neo-gothic red standstone Thomas Coats Memorial Church – known colloquially as the Baptist Cathedral of Europe – sparkles in the sunshine.

A onetime Labour voter, Hunter was swept up by the independence campaign. “The message just resonated with me. Socially progressive, honest, sincere. I just got caught up in the Zeitgeist.” If the post-referendum mood sweeps Mhairi Black into the House of Commons on May 8, Paisley will find itself firmly on the UK’s new political map.

‘WE didn’t obtain the result we wanted but sooner or later we will get the result we want,” says Norman Will, leaning back on a comfy armchair in the Yes shop in the centre of Inverness. Saltires, Basque and Catalan flags compete for space on the wall behind him.

The atmosphere in here is upbeat to the point of giddiness. The first day I try to visit it is so busy I decide to come back. The following lunchtime is a little quieter, but the flow of people is still steady. Some pick up SNP posters and election material. Others just come for a chat.

Alongside the Yes badges and keyrings, there are dog neckerchiefs, SNP high-vis jackets and tote bags made out of old copies of The National. A lending library stocks books by Jim Sillars, Tom Devine and Lesley Riddoch.

It feels rather churlish but I have to ask: Why is there a Yes shop in Inverness? The referendum was lost more than seven months ago. “This came from the community spirit that developed between independence supporters during the referendum. We decided to keep going,” says Will, 58, who also manages the office of local SNP MSP Fergus Ewing.

Ciarn MacFhionnlaigh, 32, who works in the nearby Marks & Spencer, is a regular visitor. A small blue Yes badge is pinned to the lapel of his leather jacket. “I really enjoyed the energy of the referendum especially on the street in the final week,” he says. Pinned on the walls of the shop are photographs of dense Inverness crowds, waving flags and placards, in the days leading up to September 18. “It was amazing.”

The Yes shop, which reopened in October after a brief hiatus, is supposed to be an ecumenical space. There are posters on the wall for the Green party, who are running in the constituency, but there is little doubt about where the General Election allegiances lie.

“The reality is [the SNP] are the only ones who can beat the Unionists,” says Will. A larger-than-life placard of local council leader and SNP candidate Drew Hendry leans against a nearby wall.

Hendry, well-built with a regulation army haircut, pops in briefly before heading back out on the campaign trail. A woman at McDonald’s wants to have her picture taken with him.

For decades the Highlands has been a bastion of liberalism. From Aviemore to the tip of Shetland is all shaded Liberal Democrat yellow on the UK electoral map.

The vast Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey constituency – which borders former LibDem leader Charles Kennedy’s Skye and Lochaber seat to the west – has rarely been fertile ground for the Nationalists. Danny Alexander won the seat for the LibDems with more than 40 per cent of the vote in 2010; the SNP finished a distant third on less than half that.

But this time around the polls – and the rows of posters attached to lampposts on Inverness’ blustery main street – suggest it is a straight fight between Hendry and Alexander. It is a battle between a party in the ascendancy and one trying to cling on in its one-time strongholds.

“I am pretty confident,” Alexander says during a weekday morning meet-and-greet on the streets of Inverness. I am finding that people here like the fact that we have had a Highland MP at the top of government for the last five years who has been able to get a lot of things done for this area.”

Frequently caricatured as the Conservatives’ lackey during his time in the Treasury, in the flesh Alexander is disarmingly articulate. The exchanges with Inverness voters are at times testy. One man, visibly worked up, says he will never vote liberal again. But Alexander never looks flustered. He just keeps smiling, cleaving tightly to his core message: without the LibDems in coalition, the country would be in a far worse state.

Whether that pitch will be enough for Alexander to keep his seat remains to be seen. “He definitely gets my vote,” says pensioner Ken Mackenzie. “He takes an interest in the local aspect of things, which is important, I think. Even though he spends a lot of time in London he spends a lot of time here.”

Alexander admits that the volte-face on tuition fees “does come up” – in 2010, the LibDems, having pledged to abolish university fees, promptly raised them to £9,000 a year – but says local voters are more concerned about the centralisation of power in Edinburgh. “People see that the SNP is a party that has taken power away from the Highlands,” he says, identifying the creation of a unified Police Scotland as a particular cause of alarm. Personalities have often played a bigger role in Highland politics than elsewhere in Scotland. Alexander remains well liked by many constituents. That, however, does not mean they will all be voting for him. “I don’t believe in them anymore. I used to but not now,” says Avril, a former LibDem voter in Inverness. “There are other parties that I think can do a better job.” In Inverness, the SNP is well placed to profit from the decline in LibDem support nationally and the energy generated by the referendum. The Highlands rejected independence but the result was closer than the national average and sample polling suggests the city of Inverness voted Yes.

“The SNP are doing things for Scotland, not just Westminster,” says Iona McMurtrie, 20, after a mid-week meeting with Hendry at the Iron Works, an impressive live venue in the centre of Inverness. Her friend, Roslyn Keane, 48, a support practitioner, voted for the very first time in the referendum. She will be voting SNP next month, she says. “People are seeing we are offering an opportunity for a different way of doing things,” says Hendry.

Inverness is in need of regeneration. In the city centre, To Let signs are as common as adverts for Highland tours and Loch Ness cruises, and about 30 per cent of the population live below the poverty line. Retaining young people is a problem. Technology, oil and gas and renewable energy offer “a great opportunity” for the Highlands that is not being realised, says Hendry.

A City Deal is set to deliver £300 million in investment for Inverness. Hendry says that it has been local pressure, not the ear of the Treasury, that has brought an agreement on more cash for the Highland capital to the brink of completion. He adds: “I would be quite happy for Danny [Alexander] to take the credit to get the deal over the line. But so far all we have had from him is warm words.”

There is a marked urban/rural divide in the seat, too. Hendry’s own Aird and Loch Ness ward is the size of Luxembourg. More than half the electorate is in Inverness city, with the remainder dispersed across the constituency. That demographic breakdown has meant that, despite finishing second in the seat in 2010, Labour has often struggled to make inroads. Mike Robb, runner-up last time out, says Inverness “has the same difficulties as Glasgow or Edinburgh” but in the rural hinterland public transport, broadband and wind farms are pivotal issues.

A Labour member for more than 30 years, Robb says the SNP are “picking up a strong vote on the back of the referendum” but that there is also a “silent majority” in favour of Unionist candidates.

“The Yes supporters are very visible, but there are a lot of people out there who very quietly don’t agree. They don’t put up posters but they are there,” he says. Conservative candidate Edward Mountain believes that Inverness, and Scotland, need to “move on” from the referendum. “It was an unpleasant time. We don’t need to re-fight old battles,” he says.

A soldier turned farmer, Mountain is a textbook case of nominative determinism; rugged, broad-shouldered and amiable as an episode of The Archers.

Inverness has been at the heart of another election battle in Scotland – that between Conservatives and Liberal Democrats over tactical voting. Mountain supports his party leader Ruth Davidson’s calls to resist the urge for Unionists to vote for incumbents in liberal-held seats.

“You are much better off voting for what you believe in,” he says, when we met in the local Conservative office in Inverness. On the wall are photographs of David Cameron and some of his predecessors, Margaret Thatcher, John Major and Alec Douglas-Home. The Conservatives finished a distant fourth here in 2010, but are hoping to build for the future in a region where they already have two list MSPs.

In a a measure of how constitutional politics has come to the fore, even Scottish Christian Party leader Donald Boyd says that he “a local man who wants to retain the Union” – albeit with an added emphasis on “the Christian voice”. Boyd, a minister and doctor in the local hospital, finished ahead of the Greens and Ukip in 2010. His party’s policies are closer to the latter: keep Trident, reduce immigration, pay off the national debt.

“We have a Christian attitude that begins with love your neighbour, but we also have an attitude of Christian prudence towards what the country can sustain,” says Boyd.

The Nationalists, however, seem to have a monopoly on evangelical zeal. Back in the Yes shop the glass-plated front door squeaks open. A young boy decked out in SNP yellow bounds into the centre of the floor. He is “eleven and a half” and grinning from ear to ear. He has just come back from his first ever canvass: “It was great.”

In the Highlands, as across Scotland, politics is changing. The question now is what that change will look like on May 7.

Gordon Brown addresses an audience at Loanhead Miners Welfare and Social Club in Midlothian last September

‘WHICH way will you be voting in May?” I ask a table laden with lunchtime half pints and nips in the members’ bar at Loanhead Miners Welfare and Social Club. “We’re all Labour,” says one man with a broad smile, his shoulders noticeably hunched from almost three decades down the pits. “Are we f***!” roars his drinking companion across the table.

The sound of televised horseracing fills the room. A barrel-chested man with a booming voice breaks the momentary silence. “Never talk about religion or politics in a pub.” His warning goes unheeded.

“This has been a Labour seat for years. That’s the way it will stay,” says Henry.

He worked in the colliery at nearby Bilston Glen until waves of closures hit in the mid-1980s, decimating parts of

Midlothian. Across the table Bill, an SNP supporter, shakes his head.

“No way, no way.”

Thirty years ago, Loanhead miners club was at the coalface of the battle against Margaret Thatcher to keep Scotland’s mining industry alive. Today, it is quieter, more sedate. There is a flawlessly manicured bowling lawn; posters in the club’s squat, modern community centre advertise Thai Chi and country music.

In the main function hall the weekly bingo session has just finished.

A band plays a brisk polka to mainly grey-haired older women. There is no blue plaque, but this unremarkable room has an important place in the modern political history of Scotland. It was here, on September 8 last year, that Gordon Brown made his promise for greater devolution if Scots rejected independence. Just days earlier that poll appeared showing a narrow Yes lead.

The UK would, the former Labour leader said, “move as close to federalism as you can in a country where 85 per cent of it is one nation, England”. Brown pledged to deliver “the equivalent of what Keir

Hardie asked for when he called for Home Rule for Scotland”.

Academic research suggests the significance of “the Vow” has been overstated, but in the bar at Loanhead miners club there is little doubt that the former Chancellor’s intervention was a pivotal moment.

“Gordon Brown came in here, promising this and that. That swung the vote,” says Bill. For once Henry agrees. “Brown was the best man we had.”

The connection between mining and

Labour runs deep in this corner of

Scotland. Midlothian Labour MP David Hamilton introduced Brown in the miners club last September. A former mine worker, Hamilton spent months on remand during the 1980s strike – only to be acquitted in less than a quarter of an hour at trial.

But Hamilton is standing down this time. And while the politics of the pits are not gone, they are fast disappearing. “It is still Labour here but not as staunch as it was,” says a former miner in Loanhead.

Midlothian itself is changing, its undulating hills increasingly populated by commuters who work in nearby

Edinburgh. Some of the one-time pit villages have struggled to reinvent themselves, but expectations are high that the new

Borders railway will transform towns such as Gorebridge and Bonnyrigg when it opens in September.

Midlothian now has two SNP MSPs and its first-ever nationalist council, elected in 2012. Council leader Owen Thompson is hoping to make it another first in May, by becoming the SNP MP.

Thompson grew up in Loanhead, and in the SNP. His father, a local minister, was a passionate party advocate. His mother supported Margo MacDonald’s seismic 1973 Govan by-election victory. “I probably put my first leaflet out when I was seven or eight,” says Thompson, now 37, when we meet in Midlothian House, the council’s bright, airy offices in Dalkeith. A copy of the Declaration of Arbroath on faux parchment hangs over his desk. Beside it is a Loanhead Miners’ Youth football pendant.

His election pitch is squarely aimed at Labour voters. “Many traditional Labour people are seeing that the party has gone so far from the traditional principles that the SNP is now their natural home,” says Thompson.

There is no mythical “middle Scotland”, but if there was it might be Midlothian. Just over 56 per cent of voters said No to independence.

David Hamilton’s majority is north of 10,000 but the swing needed for the SNP to take the seat is well within current nationwide polling.

Over the reception at Midlothian council offices hangs a woven tapestry bearing the inscription: “Change Comes”

Thompson is hoping the words prove prophetic.

There are, however, local considerations that could stymie the nationalist surge. The SNP council has hardly been universally popular. Cutbacks have cost jobs across the community sector and even led to the introduction of charges for care alarms.

“Every decision we have made hasn’t been easy, but there were good reasons for every decision,” says Thompson, who cites the introduction of the living wage for council employees and a sharp increase in Midlothian’s popularity as a destination for school leavers as his most significant achievements in just over a year in charge of Scotland’s second smallest council.

Labour candidate Kenny Young says that the SNP “will pay the price at the ballot box” for failing to protect the most vulnerable from council cuts.

HE says: “The nationalists are working with an independent Tory [Peter De Vink] here. The SNP say

‘we are against the Tories’ but they are working with the Tories here. That’s the big issue.”

If there is one central issue in Young’s campaign, it is health. A diabetic, he is “passionate about” the promise of 1,000 extra nurses for Scotland that Labour have pledged to fund through a so-called “mansion tax” on the UK’s richest homeowners. Young has lobbied government to have disability benefit extended to suffers of Dupuytren’s Contracture, a condition caused by operating vibrating machinery that affects the hands and fingers of many former miners. He also wants to see a

Scottish government inquiry into the policing of the miners’ strikes.

In some respects, Young and his SNP opponent are not that dissimilar.

Both grew up locally, graduating almost straight into politics. After studying history at Edinburgh University – emulating his hero Gordon Brown – Young was elected Labour student chair. He went to work on Ed Miliband’s successful leadership campaign, subsequently joining his staff before returning to Scotland to run for public office.

Young has demonstrated a steely political resolve that belies his fresh-faced

29 years. In November, he won a council by-election for Labour in the midst of the post-referendum SNP groundswell. He is confident of holding Midlothian in May.

“I would rather be the Labour candidate than the SNP candidate,” says Young. “There is no doom and gloom in the

Labour party in Midlothian.

“Part of that is we are buoyed by what people are saying on the doorsteps. We are talking about what people care about.”

Midlothian has been cited as the birthplace of the modern political campaign; it was in Dalkeith, in 1879, that William Gladstone relaunched his career, unifying the liberals and spectacularly defeating the incumbent Tory prime minister Disraeli. Nowadays, the battle on Dalkeith’s wide High Street is firmly between Labour and the SNP.

Outside a discount store, a man with a union flag pin on his flat cap will be voting “tactically” for Labour. “I don’t want another referendum. Whatever happens we need to stay together,” he says.

Elsewhere, Jim, a retired vicar, supported independence but is “expecting” to vote Labour next month.

Englishwoman Sue Kinloch is voting SNP for the first time next month.

“I want to vote with my mind and my heart,” says Kinloch, who previously backed Labour. “Scotland and Wales get sidelined. I’m not nationalist really but the only way to get Nicola Sturgeon a voice is to vote [SNP].”

Outside Dalkeith library, 18-year-old Aaron Thompson waits for a bus to take him to the nearby college. He voted

Yes in September and is divided between the SNP and the Greens this time around. But he thinks Labour’s message that only they will be able to prevent a Conservative government could sway

Midlothian voters because “people here hate the Tories, hate them with a passion”.

Back in Loanhead miners club, Alan is in two minds about his vote. The 63-year-old says he has been “Labour all my life” but is thinking of switching to the SNP. “I’m that close,” he says, holding his thumb and index finger barely an inch apart.

“I voted against independence. I want us to be together, but Labour have lost the vision that they had. Labour are finished in Scotland.”

Around the table a couple of heads nod in agreement. Just as many shake vigorously from side to side. As the bar closes up for the afternoon, the debate goes on.

the banner-carrying Principal of the Common Riding, who has ‘aye been’ a man

ON the last Friday of every July, Langholm hosts the Common Riding. In a throwback to the days of vicious Reiver battles with the English across the Border, the neat streets of brick houses and busy shops selling artisan chocolates and colourful tweed resound to a cacophony of horses’ hooves on asphalt and cheering crowds.

Like many children growing in Langholm, Laura Ellis’s daughter loved the Common Riding. She dreamed of being the “principal”, carrying aloft a blue banner at the head of the party. Her mother, who owns a craft shop on the main street, told neighbours about the young child’s wish. They laughed and said: “The principal has to be man.” But why, pressed Ellis, is it always a man? The answer came: “Because it’s aye been.”

This sense of unbending Borders tradition – “It’s Aye Been”, meaning “it’s like that and it has always been” – extends to politics too. Where the rest of Scotland fell out of love with the Conservatives in the 1970s and 1980s, the tree-lined valleys here have remained solidly blue.

Dumfriesshire, Clydesdale and Tweeddale was the only Scottish seat to return a Tory MP, David Mundell, in the 2010 General Election. This sprawling constituency, created in 2005, crosses three local authority boundaries, taking in everything from the sparsely populated farming country around Langholm to the Edinburgh commuter towns of Peebles and Biggar and even a thin slice of urban Dumfries. Before David Mundell, one-time Tory chief whip Sir Hector Munro was the Westminster representative here for more than 30 years before stepping down in 1997.

While the battle between the SNP, Labour and, in places, the Liberal Democrats rages across Scotland, there seems little appetite for political change on a weekday afternoon in Langholm. Near the imposing town hall, formerly a tollbooth, which sits bang in the middle of the main street, forcing cars to weave around it, one woman nods emphatically when I ask if she will be voting Conservative.

“[Mundell] looks after the area,” she says. “You want anything done, you phone him and he does it.” Her friend agrees. He is worried about another referendum. “We are too close to England for that [independence]. It’s alright for the people in the north of Scotland, but our hospital is just over there.”

But the sense of sleepy permanence can be misleading, too. For four centuries, Langholm lay at the heart of the Debatable Lands, a 40-square-mile tract of territory that, as the name suggests, was claimed by both England and Scotland. The cross-Border banditry only ended with the Union of the Crowns in 1603, when the wild men of the Marches came up against King James VI & I’s iron fist.

The radicalism did not end with the Reivers swinging from the gallows. The Covenanters found fertile ground in the soft Border soil. But over time the Debatable Lands were pacified. The belligerent reputation was replaced by a softer image of soporific bucolicism. The Borders, in the popular imagination, became a place where change happened slowly, if it happened at all. The area overwhelmingly voted No in the independence referendum last September. The bookmakers do not expect anything dramatic in May, either. Mundell is firm favourite to hold on.

On the winding road between Gretna and Annan, the car stereo is interrupted by traffic reports from BBC Radio Cumbria. There’s a tailback on the road to Keswick. An accident near Windermere. The names seem familiar yet foreign to my adopted Glaswegian ears. This is Border territory. Whatever Scotland’s future constitutional settlement, England will remain an integral part of life in this corner of the country.

In Annan, a tractor trundles down the main street, past solid terraces hewn of red sandstone. In the car park of the local Co-op almost a dozen SNP canvassers are gathered. It’s not even 11am and they have already been out delivering leaflets for the local candidate, Emma Harper. In normal election times the flame-haired nurse who lives outside Annan would have no hope in Dumfriesshire, Clydesdale and Tweeddale – the Nationalists barely scraped 10 per cent of the vote here last time around – but these are not normal times.

“The other candidates aren’t at the races at all. We are the only optimists who want a better Scotland,” says Harper, who returned to Scotland just over a decade ago after 14 years in California, bringing with her a US west coast sense of energy. The metallic SNP and CND badges on her jacket twinkle in the bright morning sun.

Harper’s election material stresses her 30 years’ nursing experience. She says: “I see the struggles that nurses have on the ward everyday. It is really challenging to be a nurse in the NHS right now.”

There are also particular local concerns at play: the unemployment that sends so many over the Border to work in Carlisle and further afield; food poverty; the ongoing decommissioning of Chapelcross. The plant, a few miles outside the town, used to produce weapons-grade plutonium.

Landowners are powerful in this part of Scotland, too. The Duke of Buccleuch controls some 270,000 acres, much of it running through the constituency. In 2008, Buccleuch was granted planning permission for 22 drilling sites in Canonbie, a picturesque village bisected by the River Esk. Extraction of the coal bed methane is on hold but locals worry that it could start soon.

“And that’s just phase one,” says Bill Frew, chairman of Canonbie and District Residents Association. “It’s feudal. The Duke owns everything. People work for him, or they live in his houses, or they’re tenant farmers. So they are disenfranchised and afraid to speak out.”

The SNP has become the party of protest for many fed up with the old ways. In Annan, SNP membership has soared since the referendum. A local party branch was recently reformed, having disbanded in the 1960s. The new chairman will be businessman Henry McClelland. A stocky, middle-aged man with a broad smile, McClelland is also in charge of Annan’s most famous institution: Annan Athletic football club.

Annan Athletic has “given the town profile” he says proudly. “On Sky Sports every Saturday you see Annan.” The side has reached three national semi-finals and two playoffs since joining the Scottish league in 2008, but more than that it has become a focal point of the community. McClelland is a firm believer in independence for Scotland. He says that he cried on September 19.

“The referendum isn’t going to go away,” he says. “There is going to be opportunities in the future. It won’t go away.”

Despite the strong vote for the Union in the constituency, Harper is profiting from the energy of the referendum. Her canvassers carry bright blue “Yes Scotland” clipboards. Many became politically active last year. Val is typical. Originally from Lancashire, she voted Labour for 35 years. Now she is firmly behind the SNP. “The Labour Party has diluted, diluted until it is just a shadow of the Tory Party,” she says.

But if Labour really are Tories in disguise, nobody has told Archie Dryburgh. The hirsute former union organiser at Chapelcross sits firmly on the left of the party. He supported Neil Findlay’s leadership campaign and speaks of his concerns about TTIP, the controversial Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership that many fear could lead to the privatisation of vast swathes of the NHS.

He is worried about unemployment, the threat of community hospital closures and lack of broadband investment (“Never mind superfast broadband, some of the families just want broadband!”).

We meet outside a cafe in Gretna Green, a bagpiper playing as small groups of tourists drink tea in the sunshine. Just half a mile away lies the site of the worst rail disaster in UK history. On May 22 1915, signalmen’s error led to the catastrophic crash that claimed an estimated 226 lives. Many were members of the Leith Battalion of the Scots Guard, bound for Gallipoli. Dryburgh, an army veteran himself, is spearheading the centenary commemorations. “It’s going to be a poignant time around here,” he says.

Dryburgh is unlikely to be attending the Quintinshill disaster commemorations as the local MP. But the Dumfries and Galloway councillor says he will fight hard, and rejects any suggestion that Labour supporters should vote tactically to keep the SNP out. Mundell, he says, “has a great PR team behind him. [But] people want to see action, not words.”

Dryburgh is hoping to pick up disaffected LibDem voters; the party took almost a fifth of the vote in 2010 but are nowhere to be seen this time around. Ukip polled strongly in the region in last summer’s European Parliament elections but the party is not expected to pull up any trees in Dumfriesshire, Clydesdale and Tweeddale come May. Despite the party’s fiery anti-Conservative rhetoric, their candidate, Kevin Newtown, stood numerous times – unsuccessfully – for the Tories. Mundell remains the man to beat.

The assistant secretary of state for Scotland says: “I am making a case for why we need a strong UK Government with a clear economic plan, but also we need to speak out for this area because people here often feel marginalised from central government, whether it is in London or Edinburgh.”

Earlier this week, the House of Commons’ Scottish affairs committee reported that the tendency for Whitehall departments to neglect devolved issues in Scotland and for Holyrood to centralise power in Edinburgh had created “negative consequences” for the Borders.

Mundell says the SNP represent his strongest challenge. While there is a strong Tory vote in Tweeddale, the former Social Democratic Party councillor in Annandale and Eskdale (“I was young”) can also expect to win Unionist votes in Clydesdale, long a bastion of liberal leader David Steel, and Labour-leaning Dumfriesshire.

Being Scotland’s only Tory MP has unlikely advantages. “There has never been a disagreement within our Westminster Scottish Conservative group,” Mundell chuckles. But there are real difficulties too. The Tories’ recent adverts depicting Ed Miliband as Alex Salmond’s puppet have riled many. The campaign, orchestrated from London Conservative headquarters, is aimed squarely at marginal English seats. Mundell, however, is at pains to stress: “I don’t find on the doorstep people seeing it as an anti-Scottish message”.

Ironically, the Conservatives, implacably opposed to electoral reform, are hamstrung in Scotland by first-past-the-post. The party took more than 412,000 votes in 2010 General Election – barely 80,000 fewer than the SNP – but won just one seat. The LibDems, whose vote was far more concentrated, took 11 seats with just over 465,000 votes.

“Sometimes when people look from outside they think Conservative support in Scotland is one in 59 when it reality it is around one in six,” says Mundell.

But he admits that there is “no silver bullet” for Scottish Conservatives.

“It is about talking about the issues that are important to people and having a clear set of policies and a case to make”. Nevertheless, come May, the likelihood is that there will still be more pandas than Tory MPs in Scotland.

LAST July, Rory Stewart, a former Black Watch officer and current Conservative MP for Penrith and the Border, opened the Old Acquaintances Cairn in a field on the Scottish side of the Border at Gretna. The idea was to give “ordinary people the chance to show how they feel”. The cairn still stands, and is more impressive than in the weeks before the referendum. The piles of rocks painted red, white and blue reach up to 12 feet.

There have been reports of vandalism but the only trace of this on my visit was a single profanity scrawled on a rock that said, “thanks you all”.

Inside the cairn, a stone slab says Scotland and England should not be divided “like snarling curs”. Another proclaims “we’re better far together [sic]. United we must stay.” In the corner of a molehill-filled field the River Sark burbles away. You could toss a coin and hit England.

The cairn is deserted, but in the car park of the adjacent hostelry I meet Deirdre, a Northern Irish woman who lives near Annan. She is no fan of Mundell. “I’ve never seen him. Never met him. He sends a little newsletter every now and then saying ‘I’ve done this, I’ve done that’. I just bin it.”

In May she will be sticking with Labour. “Ed Miliband isn’t a brilliant leader, but he beats David Cameron. And that’s what matters.”

While across Scotland voters seem to be turning away from once steadfast political beliefs, in the Borders it seems old certainties still hold. It’s aye been.

INVERNESS, Scotland — Last September, Scotland held a referendum on independence from the United Kingdom. The campaign was lively, colorful and, it seemed, decisive: Scots voted by a 10-point margin to stay a part of Britain. But just seven months later, another nationalist earthquake looks set to hit Scotland, shaking the foundations of British politics and even the union itself.

On a pedestrian street in the heart of Inverness, the largest city in the Scottish Highlands, a small shop shows the extent to which the independence movement is still alive in many hearts and minds — and, soon, ballot boxes. The “Yes shop,” as it’s known, is still selling badges, key rings, and even dog neckerchiefs bearing the blue-and-white “Yes” to independence logo. Basque and Catalan flags (fellow long-sufferers) hang in solidarity with the St. Andrew’s Cross on the wall. The foldout tables that run along one side of the store are stacked with posters and election leaflets for the pro-independence Scottish National Party (SNP). On a recent weekday at lunchtime, the store was packed with volunteers and activists.

“People sometimes come in with their children,” said Norman Will, the force behind the shop. “In cold weather people bring in soup and stovies [a Scottish dish made with meat and potatoes]. We have collections for the local food bank and political discussions.”

The SNP may have lost last September’s referendum but it’s emerged energized as Britain gears up for a big, national election. Indeed, the party’s new leader, Nicola Sturgeon, is just about the only popular politician in the country. Despite holding power in the devolved Scottish Parliament for eight years, the nationalists have profited from a disenchantment with established parties that persists across Europe. And now the SNP is poised to translate that frustration into political power.

The U.K. general election is scheduled for May 7. The SNP is poised to become kingmakers. In the last general election, five years ago, the nationalists won just one-fifth of the Scottish vote and only six of Scotland’s 59 seats. Now, opinion polls give the SNP almost half the Scottish vote and put the party on course to win up to 50 seats.

Such an unprecedented result would have ramifications far beyond the corridors of Westminster. The SNP surge would virtually wipe out Scottish Labour, which has won every Westminster election in Scotland since 1955. The rise of Scottish nationalism greatly increases the likelihood of a hung Parliament, too, but even more significantly it has put the question of Scottish independence — and the future of the union — front and center once more.

Since the referendum, SNP membership has quadrupled to over 100,000, making the nationalists Britain’s third-largest party, despite the fact that Scotland has only around one-twelfth of the U.K.’s total population. Among the SNP’s new supporters is Ciarn MacFhionnlaigh. The 32-year-old supermarket worker has become a regular visitor to the Inverness “Yes” shop. The referendum “was amazing,” he told me. On May 7 he will vote for the SNP, in part because he wants another referendum on independence, but he also believes that the party is best placed to “stand up” for Scotland at Westminster.

Inverness, a small, picturesque city popular with tourists setting out to explore the Highlands isn’t historically a stronghold for Scottish nationalists. The Highlands voted against independence in September, and the SNP received less than one-fifth of the votes cast here in 2010. But polls put SNP candidate Drew Hendry well ahead of the incumbent, Danny Alexander of the Liberal Democrats. Alexander, who has been the second highest-ranking official at the Treasury for the past five years, is one of the most recognizable faces in Scottish politics. His profile, however, might not save his seat.

Such unlikely electoral challenges are being repeated across Scotland. The Labour Party, in opposition in London for the last five years, have long dominated Scottish politics. Labour currently holds 40 of Scotland’s 59 seats in Westminster. But the nationalist tsunami now threatens every Labour constituency in Scotland, potentially robbing Labour leader Ed Miliband of seats he would need to form a majority government after May 7.

The town of Paisley, seven miles southwest of Glasgow, is illustrative of the scale of the challenge facing Labour. A once prosperous industrial town whose Victorian grandeur has faded since the textile mills started closing in the 1960s, Paisley has been rock solid Labour territory for decades. The party has won every general election contest here since the end of World War II, often without much of a fight.

Paisley’s MP is Douglas Alexander, a well-respected former Scottish secretary under Tony Blair and the current shadow foreign secretary. Last time out, Alexander won just short of 60 percent of the vote. Now he is trailing Mhairi Black, a 20-year-old politics student with no political experience.

“I think this constituency is quite representative of what is happening across Scotland right now,” Black told me. “What we witnessed during the referendum was a political awakening across the country. It was always going to be the case that the general election was going to be different.”

Labour’s popularity in Scotland has plummeted after joining forces with the politically toxic Conservatives to campaign against the independence referendum. Around 180,000 Labour supporters voted “yes” last September and many of them are now expected to switch their allegiances to the SNP in the general election. Labour is now on the defensive: The party has withdrawn resources from some seats in order to concentrate on Glasgow and the West of Scotland. “I’m set to Defcon fucked,” a sitting Labour MP from Scotland recently said.
While Labour comfortably won every Westminster election, the party’s standing in the Scottish Parliament has fallen steadily over the last 15 years. In 1999, Labour secured 53 of 73 seats. The party won just 11 seats in 2011. At the same time, the SNP’s share in the Scottish Parliament continued to rise. Now Scottish voters seem set to repeat their devolved preferences in a Westminster election for the first time, which could produce a nationalist landslide under the U.K.’s first-past-the-post system.

Labour has failed to appreciate that most Scots actually like the SNP, said Gerry Hassan, a research fellow at the University of the West of Scotland and author of The Strange Death of Labour Scotland. “Ever since the modern SNP was created, around 1974, opinion polls have shown that Scottish people have a positive view of the SNP. They think the SNP stand up for Scotland’s interests. The Labour Party doesn’t understand that.”

Under Sturgeon, who took over as the party’s leader last November, the SNP has tacked leftwards, directly appealing to disgruntled Labour voters who increasingly see little difference between the party of their grandfathers and the Conservatives. At a recent event in Edinburgh launching the SNP manifesto, Sturgeon promised to “end austerity,” by increasing government spending by 0.5 percent a year. The SNP’s manifesto backs a 50 percent top tax rate, an extra tax on homes worth over £2 million, new levies on bankers’ bonuses, an increase in the minimum wage, and formal recognition of Palestinian statehood.

The SNP has ruled out joining a formal coalition with Labour as long as Miliband’s party continues to support the Trident nuclear submarine program, which is housed near Glasgow. But Sturgeon has called for a looser “progressive alliance” with Labour to keep the Conservatives out of office. Meanwhile, Labour, wary of losing English voters, has insisted that there will be “no deal” with the SNP. Such obdurateness might play well in London but it is doing Labour no favors in the Scottish heartlands. Critics have accused both Labour and, particularly, Conservatives of alienating Scottish voters by demonizing the SNP.

The post-election arithmetic in Britain looks increasingly complicated. Every poll suggests there will be no clear winner, which makes a Labour deal with the SNP more likely. The Conservatives — sensing an opportunity to make gains from Labour in up-for-grabs English constituencies where Scottish nationalism is looked upon with disdain — have decried any deal with the SNP. Home Secretary Theresa May even said an arrangement with the nationalists would spark the worst constitutional crisis since the abdication of King Edward VIII in 1936.

Even if the SNP was invited into a coalition with Labour, the Scottish party might have good reason not to join. The SNP’s primary focus remains on Scotland, in particular the 2016 elections for the Scottish Parliament. The party is unlikely to want ministerial seats in London, which would make the task of differentiating themselves from Labour more difficult next year. At the same time, the SNP are wary of facilitating the formation of another Conservative-led government by failing to support Labour. “The SNP can’t sign a blank check to Labour, but they can’t be seen to bring a Labour government down so they have to play a very careful hand,” said Hassan.

The SNP’s record-high poll ratings have fueled speculation that Sturgeon would like to hold a second vote on independence. In order for that to happen, the party would need another majority in Edinburgh next year. But that’s still a long way off. The SNP will not go to the polls again until they know they can win, said Paul Cairney, professor of politics at the University of Stirling.

“The SNP won’t win enough votes [in the general election] if they look like the independence party and nothing more,” said Cairney. “And they have dealt with that problem well. Long-term referendum chances hinge on them remaining a credible party of government in Scotland and, for now, a positive force in the U.K.”

Nonetheless, pro-independence sentiment remains energized ahead of the election. In the “Yes” shop in Inverness, Emma Roddick, a 17-year-old student, said she has “lost count” of the number of hours she has spent making pro-independence badges and pins. She is too young to vote but has no doubts about Scotland’s political destiny.

“The union is always going to lose its purpose,” she told me. “The only argument is not are we going to be independent but when are we going to be independent..” For its supporters, a resounding SNP showing on May 7 will be another important milestone on the road to the break-up of Britain.

“Which way will you be voting in May?” I ask a table laden with lunchtime half pints and nips in the members’ bar at Loanhead Miners Welfare and Social Club in Midlothian, half a dozen miles or so from Edinburgh. “We’re all Labour,” says one man with a broad smile.

“Are we fuck!” roars his drinking companion across the table. The sound of televised horse racing fills the room, breaking the momentary silence.

“This has been a Labour seat for years. That’s the way it will stay,” says Henry. His shoulders are noticeably hunched from almost three decades down the pits.

Across the table, Bill, a Scottish National Party supporter, shakes his head. “No way, no way.”

Midlothian has been rock solid Labour territory for decades. Thirty years ago, Loanhead Miners club was at the coalface of the ultimately futile battle against Margaret Thatcher to keep Scotland’s mining industry alive. Today, it is quieter, more sedate. There is a flawlessly manicured bowling lawn. Posters advertise Thai Chi and country music. In the main function hall the weekly bingo session has just finished.

This unremarkable room has an important place in the modern political history of Scotland. It was here, on September 8 of last year, that Gordon Brown made a promise for greater devolution if Scots rejected independence. What became “the Vow” was credited by many with swinging the referendum in the union’s favor.

But just seven months later, Midlothian is an SNP target seat. Local Labour MP David Hamilton, who spent months on remand 1980s miners’ strike, is standing down. Polls suggest it is a straight two-way tussle between Labour and the Scottish Nationalists next month.

Such unlikely electoral clashes are being repeated across Scotland as tens of thousands of one-time Labour supporters flock to the SNP. Labour has long been the dominant force in Scottish politics. The nationalists currently have just six MPs. Labour has 40.

Labour’s popularity has plummeted after joining forces with the Conservatives—a toxic brand in Scotland—to campaign against independence. This earned them the moniker “Red Tories.” Recent polls suggest the SNP could win 50 of Scotland’s 59 Westminster seats. Today, a poll suggested they could win 57 seats, leaving Labour with just one MP.

Scottish Labour, increasingly cash-strapped, have withdrawn resources from some seats they hold to concentrate on Glasgow and the West of Scotland. A sitting Scottish Labour MP recently described the state of the party as “now set to defcon fucked.”

Among the former Labour voters now swinging behind the SNP is Keith Aitchison. As a young man growing up in Glasgow, Aitchison was a staunch Labour supporter. At general election time he even campaigned for the party. Now retired and living in the Highland city of Inverness, Aitchison will be voting Scottish Nationalist on May 7.

“I came to the conclusion that within the Westminster political system you can’t change things because everything is pointed towards the need for votes in the south of England,” says Aitchison in Inverness’s “Yes” shop—a city center store created before last September’s independence referendum.

Despite that defeat, the shop is still open, selling badges and key rings, and even SNP dog neckerchiefs and high-vis jackets. “The only party around that has a proper attitude towards creating social justice seems to be the SNP,” he says.

Alex Mosson spent 23 years as a Labour councillor in Glasgow but no longer backs the party he joined as a Clyde shipyard worker in 1978.

“A lot of people have lost faith in the Labour party,” says Mosson, a former Lord Provost of Glasgow who supported independence. “In the months leading up to the referendum there was a mood among people. There was a feeling that something could be done. That will not change now.”

Even Labour supporters who voted no in September seem uncertain about the party. “I always voted Labour but not now,” says Anne, who returned to Glasgow six years ago after several decades in Canada. She likes SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon but “cringes” when she watches Ed Miliband on television.

Scottish Labour leader Jim Murphy, appointed late last year, has been unable to stem the bleeding. Polls suggest that Sturgeon is far more popular with voters than the former Blairite Scotland secretary.

The SNP has aimed its election pitch squarely at Labour supporters. Nicola Sturgeon has promised an end to austerity and a greater rise in the minimum wage than Labour. At the SNP manifesto launch in Edinburgh last Monday, the Scottish First Minister Sturgeon pledged that nationalist MPs would “lock out” the Conservatives from government and “help Labour be bolder.” That message chimes with many Scottish voters.

“The SNP is a soft-left, social-democratic party on the mainstream European model and they have a constitutionally radical position. The combination of these two things is an attractive proposition,” says the New Statesman’s Jamie Maxwell.

“Labour in Scotland has one election slogan and one election platform: ‘Vote SNP, Get Tories.’ I think they’ve miscalculated this.”

Labour’s sudden decline in Scotland looks stark. The party won 42 percent of the vote here in the last general election, in 2010. The SNP finished third on barely a fifth.

But Labour’s supremacy in the devolved Scottish parliament has been on the wane for over the last decade and a half. In 1999, Labour secured 53 of the 73 Scottish Parliament constituency seats. In 2011, the party won just 11, with only “top up” list seats saving it from annihilation.

Meanwhile, many of Labour’s Scottish “big beasts,” including former Prime Minister Gordon Brown, are leaving the Westminster political scene. Their departures have further weakened the party’s appeal to its one-time supporters as it looks like a sad tribute act.

The weakening of Labour in Scotland might not be all bad news for the party, says Tim Bale, professor of politics at Queen Mary University of London. Labour has long been over reliant on its Scottish contingent, he says. “Some Labour people think that if the party was more English it would help it.”

Jim Sillars, a former Labour MP who left the party in the mid 1970s and eventually joined the SNP, says that defeat for Labour in Scotland next month could hasten independence. “If we can remove Labour from central Scotland this will be transformational and could lead to independence in a much shorter time frame than people realize.”

That’s something Labour will be keen to avoid, but the more immediate problem for Scottish Labour isn’t the death of the union, so much as staying alive as a political force.

Glasgow, Scotland – There is an old adage that in Glasgow, Labour votes are weighed not counted, such is the party’s historical dominance of Scotland’s largest city.

Labour has controlled Glasgow city council for all but five of the last 63 years. All seven Glasgow MPs were elected with a red rosette pinned to their lapel.

But there are signs that Labour’s supremacy in Glasgow – and Scotland – could be coming to an end, with huge repercussions for the whole of the United Kingdom.

In the 2010 general elections, Labour won 42 percent of the vote in Scotland, and up to 68 percent in some Glasgow constituencies.

But recent polls put the Scottish National Party (SNP) on course to win a crushing victory in May’s UK vote, ending Labour’s monopoly on power north of the border and jeopardising Labour leader Ed Miliband’s prospects of becoming prime minister.

Glasgow Central is the kind of seat Labour once held almost without trying. A diverse constituency taking in the luxury flats of the Merchant City and the tower blocks of the Gorbals, Glasgow Central has been united by one factor – Labour.

Crumbling support

In the last general election, Labour’s Anas Sarwar won more than half the vote.

People in Glasgow have voted Labour for generations and finally they are starting to wake up to the fact that the Labour Party are not the party they thought they were.

Alison Thewliss, SNP candidate

In Glasgow Central, the SNP polled barely one-third of the Labour vote in 2010. A recent poll, however, puts the nationalists 10 points ahead in the seat.

“People in Glasgow have voted Labour for generations, and finally they are starting to wake up to the fact that the Labour Party are not the party they thought they were,” said the SNP candidate, local councillor Alison Thewliss.

Although Scotland voted to stay in the United Kingdom, every constituency in Glasgow voted to leave.

Labour was at the forefront of the pro-union “Better Together” campaign, but some 190,000 Labour supporters backed independence.

Most are now expected to vote Scottish nationalist, turning a raft of once-red Labour heartlands to SNP canary yellow.

“People say Labour ganged up with the Tories during the referendum. That has really sickened them,” said Thewliss.

Defeat for Labour in seats such as Glasgow Central would make the task of winning control in Westminster much more difficult.

But on a cold weekday afternoon, there is little enthusiasm for the traditional party.

“I’m voting SNP. Labour seems to have the same policies as the Tories,” said a middle-aged Asian man, who requested anonymity, in Govanhill, home to one of Scotland’s largest immigrant communities and once a bedrock of Labour support.

Even those who voted “no” to independence are uncertain about Labour.

“I always voted Labour – but not now,” said Anne, who returned home to Glasgow six years ago after several decades in Canada. She said she likes SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon, but “cringes” when she watches Ed Miliband on television.

Interests of Scotland

Across Scotland, Labour faces similar problems.

The SNP enjoy leads of up to 20 points in the polls. Recently elected Scottish leader Jim Murphy has not brought the electoral bounce many expected.

Ed Miliband has refused to rule out a deal with the SNP after the general election, much to the chagrin of many of Labour’s 40 Scottish MPs who face being washed away in a nationalist tsunami on May 7.

Writer Gerry Hassan said the stark decline of Labour in Scotland has deeper roots than just their alliance with the Conservatives in last year’s referendum campaign.

In an upmarket café on the edge of Pollokshields East, one of Anas Sarwar’s strongest areas in the constituency, the author of The Strange Death of Labour Scotland explained: “This is a long-term thing. Getting into bed with the Tories has hurt Labour, but it’s not the biggest thing.

“They haven’t answered the question of what Scottish Labour is for, beyond its own self-preservation.”

Labour has failed to appreciate that most Scots actually like the SNP, said Hassan.

“Ever since the modern SNP was created, around 1974, opinion polls have shown that Scottish people have a positive view of the SNP.

“They think the SNP stand up for Scotland’s interests. The Labour party doesn’t understand that.”

Glasgow and Labour have long been synonymous in the Scottish political psyche, but Hassan said the party’s grip on the city has often been more imaginary than real.

“I don’t think there ever was a golden age for Scottish Labour. The Labour vote has died and moved,” said Hassan, citing the halving of Glasgow’s population since World War II, and dwindling election turnouts.

Labour’s Anas Sarwar succeeded his father Mohammad, Britain’s first Muslim MP, in 2005. The 32-year-old dentistry graduate said he is “confident, not complacent” of holding his seat in two month’s time.

Sarwar’s pitch is an unambiguous one – vote Labour to keep the Conservatives out. The Tories, who draw most of their support in the south of England, are unpopular in Scotland, and practically toxic in Glasgow.

Just one of Glasgow’s 79 councillors is Conservative.

“I know a Tory government is bad for Glasgow. I know what Glasgow needs is a Labour government, not a Tory one, and I want to make sure by accident that we don’t end up a Tory government,” said Sarwar.

But Cass MacGregor, Scottish Greens candidate in Glasgow Central, said voters are “fed up” being told to back Labour to keep the Tories out.

“People have to vote for what they believe in. Trying to vote based on the people you don’t want to win is what has got us into this mess in the first place,” said MacGregor.

The Greens are unlikely to win but could attract plenty of support, particularly from students in a constituency that includes a large student body.

Alex Mosson is testament to how much politics in Glasgow has changed. The former Lord Provost spent 23 years as a Labour councillor in the city, but no longer backs the party he joined as a Clyde shipyard worker in 1978.

“A lot of people have lost faith in the Labour party,” said Mosson, who left the Labour party and voted for independence last year.

“They want someone who speaks for their views. There has been a sea-change in people’s thinking.

“In the months leading up to the referendum, there was a mood among people. There was a feeling that something could be done. That will not change now.”

Whether this shift will be enough to deliver a sweeping SNP victory in May remains to be seen, but one thing seems certain – the days when scales were needed to tally Labour votes in Glasgow are coming to an end.

The historic multi-party debates in the UK have rekindled political diversity [Reuters]

Glasgow, UK – Some seven million viewers across Britain tuned into the first, and only, televised multi-party debate ahead of May’s general election. What they saw on April 2 was a stark illustration of how much UK politics has changed in recent years.

Polls declared Scottish National Party (SNP) leader Nicola Sturgeon the victor of the night, followed by the eurosceptic United Kingdom Independence Party’s (UKIP) Nigel Farage.

British politics has long been a two-horse race. But the field for May’s general election is increasingly open, potentially spelling a permanent end to centuries of single-party majority rule at Westminster.

In 1951, 97 percent of the UK electorate voted Labour or Conservative. At the last general election, in 2010, that figure was just two in three, leading to a historic coalition between the Tories and the Liberal Democrats.

This time around, the prospects of one party winning overall control look even slimmer.

We have about a quarter of the electorate saying they are going to vote for someone other than Conservative, Labour or Lib Dem. That is just off the end of the historical pattern.

John Curtice, Strathclyde University professor

Labour and Conservatives are tied at 34 percent each, according to aBBC poll of polls.

The Labour party would need a lead of around five points to win a majority, said John Curtice, professor of politics at Strathclyde University.

Due to the vagaries of Britain’s first-past-the-post system, the Tories, who draw most of their support in the richer south, would require a seven-point margin of victory to emerge with the 326 seats needed to command a majority in the House of Commons.

The reality, said Curtice, is there is unlikely to be a clear winner on May 7. “We have never seen an election like this.”

“We have about a quarter of the electorate saying they are going to vote for someone other than Conservative, Labour or Lib Dem. That is just off the end of the historical pattern. You can go all the way back to 1832 and you won’t beat it,” Curtice said.

Horse-trading and deal-brokering

A hung parliament would necessitate something on which British politics has traditionally not been strong: horse-trading and deal-brokering.

The coalition government has long been the norm on the continent, but in the UK it is still a relative novelty. A predicted collapse in the Liberal Democrat vote – and theFixed Term Parliaments Act introduced in 2011 to make dissolving Westminster almost impossible – could make the business of forming a new government even more tricky.

This all means that the party that emerges in the strongest position may have to reach an arrangement – either a formal coalition or a looser deal – with one or more of the UK’s insurgent parties.

The most likely kingmaker is the SNP, which is campaigning on an anti-austerity message. Despite defeat in last September’s independence referendum, the nationalists have seen their support surge.

Membership has quadrupled to more than 100,000. Polls suggest that the SNP may win dozens of seats from Labour, making it far more difficult for Miliband to secure a majority.

“Something has profoundly changed about how the Scottish public see and do politics and their role in the union. Passivity, acceptance and belief in traditional elites – Labour included – now seem a thing of the past.”

UK parties have struggled to understand the SNP surge.

Last weekend a leaked memo purportedly revealing that nationalist leader Sturgeon had told a French diplomat that she would prefer another Tory administration, appeared in the right-wing Daily Telegraph.

But the smear appears to have backfired, with both sides flatly denying the claims. Questions have been raised about how the civil service document was released. An inquiry will now be held.

While the SNP will take votes from Labour in Scotland, the Conservatives in particular face a threat from the UKIP. The party, which campaigns on a hard-right platform based on clamping down on immigration and leaving the European Union, is particularly popular with socially conservative, white working class voters.

Cameron has promised a referendum on EU membership in a bid to stem the UKIP tide. UKIP’s best chances of success rest with its colourful leader Farage in South Thanet.

On the opposite end of the political spectrum, the Greens believe this could be their breakthrough year. Having polled barely one percent in the 2010 general elections, the left-wing environmentalists are hoping to add to their solitary seat in Brighton Pavilion.

However, the winner takes all nature of the British electoral system means both UKIP and the Greens are struggling to win more than a handful of seats.

All the same

Darren Hughes of the Electoral Reform Society, says that the “lottery” nature of the May’s election shows that the time has come to replace first-past-the-post with a more proportional voting system.

Regardless of the prospects of electoral reform, the duopoly in British politics could be coming to an end as voters leave Labour and Conservatives for small, identity-based parties.

Across the UK, traditional class structures, and the political affiliations that went with them, are breaking down, says Professor Curtice.

“Fewer people now feel a strong sense of identification with a political party. There are fewer people who say ‘I am Labour, I am Tory or whatever.’ We are less tribal about our politics.”

At the same time, voters see little to choose between Miliband and Cameron, or between their respective parties.

“The Conservatives and Labour in recent elections have tended to look more similar to each other in the eyes of the electorate,” says Curtice.

Whoever wins in May, the likelihood is that when the UK general election next swings around in 2020 television producers will need to invest in larger studios. The panel of party leaders could be even bigger.